A Stranger Kind of Empathy
by Namida-sama
Summary: Hikari, a resident of the Shelter, an underground safe-house that protects its refugee populace from the devastated surface world after a mysterious meteor shower destroys all human civilization. She goes to the surface to scout for signs of life with her partner, whose motives are enigmatic. There she finds a man who has oddly survived for months despite the unlivable conditions.
1. Chapter 1

A stranger Kind of Empathy 1

Stay Put

I worked up the gumption to get this moving again. This time I'll finish it; I've got the whole basic plot written, but I can`t always fill in the words.

* * *

It had happened just a little while ago, a matter of months in the past.

It turned out that the crazy doom cult had been right all along about the end of the world, about the meteor shower that would tear apart everything that had been a beacon of longevity for humans- their governments, their monuments, whole little civilizations. The huge underground shelter that the government had been secretly funding for years had come in handy after all, and the crews in charge of its operation had mobilized and organized admirably when the time came for the members of its organization to seek sanctuary.

The most mysterious part about the shower was that no one had seen it coming. None of the astronomers or physicists with their million-dollar equipment had any inkling of where the meteors had come from, or how to counteract them until it was too late.

The generally accepted theory was that after the fires had died down, the meteors had released unusual radioactive compounds that had doomed any surviving life on the surface. According to the veterans who had been up there, the water was gray, and the clouds of ash still blocked out the sun, even after all those years. Sometimes you couldn't even tell if it was day or night. The psychology and therapy wards of the hospital were consistently thriving and bustling with too many traumatized patients and too little counselors and professionals to round them up and deal with them at once.

Hikari had no personal memory of the roiling chaos of firestorms and collapsing buildings- she had been sleeping fitfully, afflicted with nightmares in the weeks leading up to the catastrophe, and had raided the medicine cabinet clandestinely for the strongest sedatives it had to offer that night. She went to sleep in her quiet, cool room, and had woken up in a bright white room filled with shouts and bandaged bodies. Her left arm and part of her shoulder blade had been burned severely, the flesh melted like wax. She was later told of the unfortunate events surrounding the demise of her parents- they had recruited other members of the Shelter organization to move her after being unable to rouse her from her sleep, and had made it to the entrance before they were crushed by a waterfall of rubble from a nearby meteor impact. Hikari, lying dormant on a makeshift stretcher, had been mere inches from sharing the same sad end.

Someone had found her and brought her in with her little backpack of books and empty water bottles, and set her up in a little cubicle of a room. She was tested for any particular special ability almost as soon as she was expelled from the infirmary, and put immediately into training for a scouting position.

This decision was based on her total lack of notable physical strength, her average intelligence, and most pathetically, her consistently poor grades in both innovation studies and mechanics. And she was thus assigned to be a life scout, to search the uplands thoroughly for any form of live creature, friendly or otherwise. It was widely regarded as something of a suicide mission, a position to get rid of the burdensome and useless, and the few friends she had made hugged her time after time when they learned of it.

Three weeks after her graduation from the school, the Administration arranged a meeting with her to discuss her job.

The councillor assigned to her was a lean and stringy woman with hair in a mousy bun and a long purple scar dividing her cheek neatly in half. The conference room was lit with unreliable panel lights that reinforced the starkness of the walls and sparse furniture. Decoration of any sort was a waste of materials. As soon as Hikari sat across from her, she began into her rehearsed, mandatory speech with businesslike efficiency.

"Your job is one of the most vital to the Shelter, and we thank you for your great contribution." She slid a battered clipboard across the little table with two prematurely gnarly fingers.

"This will have all the information you will need to know about your position." The woman was clearly unprepared for questions, and Hikari was too convinced of the certainty of her demise to bother asking any.

The sheet was as brief as the lady had been; paper consumption was strictly monitored. The job would be undertaken in three separate trips to the surface, aided by an escort. Attendance was mandatory, but not enforced. Desertion was death, and there was nowhere to hide in the Shelter. Someone would recognize you and turn you in to be forced along on your mission.

Hikari was to meet her escort in two days, and spent the time alone, mentally preparing herself. She was unable to get an appointment in the booming therapy ward to talk to someone about it, and so consoled herself by looking over the contents of that long-gone little backpack; her only possessions.

There were two novels and three picture books, a reusable plastic sport water-bottle with a modern black design, and a note on a scrap of paper written in black ink that had gotten wet at one point, and the words had washed out into rainbow illegibility. She liked to think of it as some heartfelt last sentiments from her parents, and often imagined wistfully what it might say, though it was likely a grocery list left in the knapsack from years gone by, run through the washing machine time and again.

She wasn't technically supposed to have these nice things. Everyone was supposed to be equal in possessing nothing, so as to quell any riots spawned from a feeling of unfairness. There was a huge hole in the bottom of her mattress, however, that served as a good hiding spot. She would shove the books and bottle up and over from the hole, and pack it tightly with scraps of tissue or rags- foolproof, given her limited resources.

The day arrived, though Hikari hoped and wished and tried to use her imagined psychic powers to push it back. Her partner was a tall and lean fellow with round, cracked spectacles and a hard mouth. His long black hair was tied up, and his grayish eyes were appropriately cold and calculating for a doctor of his status. Why was he was bothering to risk his life and very comfortable career to go up with a fledgling scout who would probably get them both killed?

He wore a yellowed old canvas coat with bulging pockets, and carried two knapsacks that were packed to the seams. His posture was immaculate when he sat across from her in the still-shiny steel cafeteria chair. He spoke very clearly and formally, but not without a hearty dose of analytical aloofness.

"Hello."

"Hi." Hikari couldn't meet his intense gaze- it was like looking into the eyes of a dragon.

"We shouldn't have any trouble if you follow my lead. I've been up to the surface five times as an emergency medic." He got right into the meat of the matter. Formalities were of little concern to him, it seemed, which only reinforced the awkward atmosphere.

"I _will_ get you out alive. I know you don't think you'll make it."

Her lips thinned uncomfortably. The condescending note in his voice, which he obviously meant to be soothing, made her instantly wary.

"It's really a simple job. You just push the ash around and look for buried things. Plants, new growth, bolts, useful bits of metal, old parts. You're especially looking for live animals and people. That means that the land can support life once again, and the Shelter can begin colonization on the surface."

"Okay." He apparently had no further instructions, and got up and left as quickly as he had arrived, leaving her slumped in her chair with a weight like a stone in her stomach.

She knew how to do everything she needed to do on the trip. She could log her findings in the correct format, pitch a tent, filter water, build fires. Survive.

But Hikari wasn't prepared to deal with her co-worker, or, really, anything she would find on the surface.

* * *

Thank you for reading this! And reviewing, favouring, whatever it is that you did. That is a great source of support and motivation.

On an unrelated rant, I sort of want to branch off into different areas, like Rune Factory, or Homestuck, or Grand Chase, even a different Harvest Moon game, but Animal Parade is the one I know best, my safety blanket, and in my opinion, one of the last really good Harvest Moon games. I dunno if a foray into another fandom would really be worthwhile anyway. But as the game gets older and less people play it, fewer readers come to Fanfiction to look for AP stories, which is a little frustrating. It's sort of awkward trying to write a Fanfiction for a game or whatever when you don't know it completely, even if you're writing an AU. Gotta have that base knowledge.


	2. Chapter 2

A Stranger Kind of Empathy Chapter 2

Going Up

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Hikari barely remembered what a morning was. Only the clock in her chamber told her when to wake. There was no physical indication of the passing of time- the long, cold concrete halls with their stark electric lights continued on forever, into a windowless, cocoonlike main atrium dominated by a long glass elevator which took personnel to the surface. Rows upon rows of doors and entranceways lined the massive room, which was always jammed with families bidding what was usually their last goodbye to their kin who were going up to scout or do research. Many of them would bang on the elevator doors, which, once sealed, could not be opened from inside until they reached the old city on the surface. Children in the lower education levels, future scouts like herself, had a rumor about the place which they told themselves fearfully and their friends bravely at night. They said that the city directly above the Shelter was a crumbling ruin full of zombie-like mutants who made tents from the bones and clothes of past scouts- the melted, blood-drinking, flesh-eating memories of past mothers, cousins, brothers, friends. The Administration had released an official statement disproving their rumors after the kid had stirred up a small panic in one of the residential sectors. Their darling little imaginations, which they exerted freely and not without an abundance of tears in therapy, cooked up aliens, monsters, beasts of every persuasion. And the most frightening thing about their delusions was that the Administration could prove none of it wrong. The surface world was one big Schrödinger's cat- simultaneously harmless and deadly until someone provided proof and the cat was let out of the box. The meteors had gone unpredicted by even the most advanced of technologies, and later samples of the debris had been found to contain minerals and elements that had never been seen or even suspected- their effects on living beings were unknown and presumed dangerous. The shelter researchers were kept extremely busy working on antidotes and treatments for the strange radiation poisoning the scouts often came back with- there was nothing quite like it in any of their mouldering textbooks.

That particular morning, she found a lumpy package wrapped in canvas, identical to the suspicious bundle that the doctor had been carrying the day before in the cafeteria. It was heavy with supplies, some basic, and some rather obscure. Among them were food rations, a couple of emergency instruction manuals, two long, wicked knives that were most assuredly not for eating with, iodine tablets for purifying water, a yellowed, ripped parachute, and a cheap notebook with a cover patterned with rows of Technicolor smiley-faces. A plastic pen with a rainbow barrel and a stained nib. A lighter. Microscope slides for anything she might find. Hikari dressed slowly and prepared to go to the atrium, where she had so often savored a book or a chat with her friends, despite the general melancholy and bustle of grieving families. It was her turn to do her duty- no weaseling out, no backing away.

The young doctor from before was standing near the elevator, and gave a terse smile as she walked up.

"I believe we forgot our introductions during our previous meeting. Call me Jin." He extended a pale hand.

"Pleasure to…meet you, Dr. Jin."

They shook hands and took their place in the elevator line to pass through security.

The elevator was suffocating, the air dry and smelling of old plastic and mildewed fabric. The newer recruits huddled around the edges and watched out of the glass walls as their families got smaller and smaller. The more experienced looked up at the endless dark tunnel, watched it swallow them up. There was darkness and turbulence, and then a flickering, wavery yellow light came on. One ghost-pale young man with a long scar peeking out of his jacket collar was muttering prayers under his breath.

The elevator-load reached the second terminal and stopped, unlocking to let off its passengers, who scurried through the bare, damp rock cavern to their respective tunnels. Some went to other elevators. Jin and Hikari stayed on board the original main elevator; they were assigned to scout the city directly above the shelter.

By the time they reached the final underground station, they were alone in the little glass room but for a tall, lanky woman with a curtain of dark hair. Jin kept sneaking little glances at her- at her scarred, long hands, her round, pouchy face. Hikari wondered if they were acquainted somehow. The lady noticed their stares and shot back a rather icy look of her own and left the elevator in a hurry at the stop before the last above-ground terminal. Jin said nothing.

They reached the surface, and left the elevator only to discover another terminal made of concrete. It was an expansive space, full of huge metal beams and scavenged building materials. Much of the twisted scraps had been shoved in one dark corner, and looked as though they had been untouched for months. The pair was alone in the terminal, and neither spoke. The only sound was the eerie whistling of wind- an unsettling sound which was almost entirely foreign to her. There was a tiny door covered with a thick metal cover attached to a pulley system, which had to be pulled up by hand. It took the both of them combined to lift the door, and it slammed shut loudly behind them, ejecting them into a cold, eerie world of gray. Hikari, nervous, turned and tried to look for a way back in, but there was none. There was only the sealed door and the huge box of a building that it gave entrance to. There were no buttons, levers, pulleys or even any handles or edges to grip to pry the door back open.

"When we are ready to leave, we will contact the Administration and they will arrange for the door to be unsealed. Until then," He gestured to the barren landscape "we have quite a distance to cover before we reach our destination. Much of the original city was destroyed in the shower and only the core remains." Jin pointed across the vast colourless plain.

The world there was totally gray, as if all the colour and texture of the former city. They began their march- Hikari was surprised at the effort it took to move her feet. A thick layer of ash that coated the ground like snow, and it reduced travelling speed to a disheartened trudge. Every so often, they passed the wrecked and crumbling remains of brick walls, and more rarely, the old, charred and warped skeletons of recent buildings. Huge craters where the meteors had landed dotted the flat land, and she could see a grayer expanse in the distance. The sea.

According to Jin, who kept up an awkward pseudo-friendly chatter throughout the trek, the area had been covered in forests and plains before the shelter, simply full of plants, and all the ash was from the firestorm that had ravaged the city after the shower.

They passed a huge rock, riddled with holes and crested a steep hill. The city lay in the distance, a collection of old history and ruined scraps. Off to the side, the silhouette of an enormous mountain jutted from the gentle hills. Dust blew up in little tornadoes and whipped about before them. The sky was light, but had no colour; was as solidly without hue as the rest of the landscape, and fit in nicely. It was an eerie place with no sign of life, and no sound save for the wind and the constant sweep of soft dust. Hikari felt constantly as though something was lying awake and watching from under one of the numerous piles of rubbles, waiting to pounce. Jin was a little ill-at-ease, and though he kept up his monologue to soothe her, it was apparent and blatant that his mind was elsewhere.

Hikari could only hazard a guess as to what he could devote so much think-time to, and she warranted that it was nothing pleasant, given the circumstances.

* * *

Been a while- it's a busy time, what with exams and all that. For me, writing is hard until I actually get down and do it. It's getting up the motivation that kills. I got Persona 4 Golden recently and I've been listening to the upbeat, casual soundtrack a lot.


	3. Chapter 3

A Stranger Kind of Empathy Chapter 3

Buried

I don't own Harvest Moon, etc.

* * *

Setting up the basics of their camp and finding enough useable scraps to start a fire had taken much of the afternoon. The murky, lukewarm light was fading fast, and the ruins around them turned into a nightmare landscape of stirring dust and looming, twisted shadows. The wind came in gusts, and blew grit into Hikari's red-brown hair, which she eventually stopped picking out. It was a futile effort. She was, however, relieved at the lack of zombies, however childish her fear may have been in the first place. Jin had smuggled some tea in his pack, and was enjoying a cup, huddled close to the fire. The silence was long and melancholy.

She wasn't entirely sure of her safety in the old world, and looking at the shadows that changed constantly in the wind did nothing to reassure her. She bade Jin a nervous goodnight, and went off to sit in the tent and brood. There was no way she would be doing anything resembling sleeping that night.

Hikari surprised herself by sleeping excellently. It had been a deep and dreamless rest, and in the first moments of lucidity she could hardly imagine that she had ever left her little bed in the shelter. Reality, when it finally came to her, hit like a brick.

It was a blustery day, and the wind made the walls of the tent flex and shudder. She dressed quickly under the cover of her little bedroll, and went outside, into another gray morning. Jin was already up, cooking something over the coals of the fire. She sat down opposite him.

In spite of her trepidation, Hikari felt a spark of childish excitement at the prospect of a huge old city, filled with new things to explore and treasures to find. It made her think of the times she spent as a child, wanting to climb the huge piles of rubble and gravel at construction sites around her neighborhood, which was new and in development, and feeling like an exploring pioneer when she reached the top. She would tie scraps of fabric to sticks and go exploring with them, planting the makeshift markers to show her where she had left off when her mother called her home. Then they would have a nice dinner, stew when it was cold out, and if the day was special, a dessert. In the summer it was always soft cakes with berries and mounds of fluffy aerosol cream.

Her eyes stung. That happy old life was dead and gone, and she had to face the sobering truth- that there was a city to explore, that there were likely to be dead people in the city, and that she had to come back alive- there were people waiting for her to return safely. She brushed away the little tears that had pooled in the corners of her eyes with the back of one hand and stood, strong.

The breakfast she ate was scanty at best. She was simply too riled up to eat. The city was further away than she'd thought, and she regretted not eating more before she left. Her thoughts of food were quickly dispelled as she approached the first building, however, as she noticed a strange pattern in the buildings.

There seemed to be a point at which the damage to the buildings became worse. She set a straight path for the centre of town, and picked her way through the refuse. The least damaged building in town was a smallish, old-looking periwinkle-painted brick affair. It was almost entirely preserved, save for one wall that looked as though it had been knocked down with a battering ram. The bricks were not scorched or tarnished with soot- this had not been the work of the shower. The gaping hole had been patched with what looked to be a canvas sail, lashed with rope to the foundation. She went to investigate, her heart in her throat. That patch had been done recently, which meant that someone had survived the shower. The building had a sort of makeshift wall made of fallen bricks and metal scrap around it, and she took care not to cut herself on the sharp, jutting edges. Inside the perimeter of the fortifications, there was a line of tubing which ran around the roof and fed into a funnel, which dripped into a bucket. A water collector, made to purify drinking water through the abundance of charcoal available. Hikari was shaking. There had to be someone in this house- someone in this town, rather- that was alive.

The first room, past the smashed-in door, was expansive, with a high ceiling and few windows. It looked as though the fires had never reached it, and was full of fallen books from shelves that had been pushed to the floor. Everywhere, paper. A small set of crumbling stairs led to a platform on which stood the remains of a huge telescope, which seemed to have been dismantled for parts. Its lens leaned against the wall, forgotten and thickly covered in ash.

She picked up a piece of paper, but found that it was covered in strange symbols that she had never seen before, unlike any language she had learned of. Diagrams and measurements in precise detail were scribbled across the backside of the sheets. Hikari stuffed some in her pack, hoping that Dr. Jin, who was more educated, could decipher it.

There were a couple side tables, covered with papers and other objects that she didn't dare touch- one seemed to be some sort of ball made of glass at one point, but it had chipped. A large pot sat on the widest table, but its contents appeared to be rancid. No flies buzzed around it, however, and over time, it had developed a thick crust of ash from the dust-filled air.

In the very furthest corner from the entrance, near the huge hole in the wall, was a small bed. Beside it was a bright blue child's plastic toy pail, the kind she remembered seeing at the beach, with a little bit of water in it.

And on the bed was a person. She rushed over, hoping and pleading with whatever entity was out there that he was still alive, and the cosmos answered. She could see his chest rising shallowly, though he was remarkably thin and seemed to have sustained great damage to his left eye, which was closed and had a great crust of dried blood around it. His clothes were in tatters, and he bore several deep scars, some of which she was certain were stab wounds. Hikari could not tell outwardly if he had any broken bones, but did not want to risk making anything worse.

The man opened his eyes and looked at her, calmly, as though he had been expecting her all along, and was a little upset that he couldn't offer her tea. His left eye began bleeding again, sluggishly, and she reached out, not knowing what else to do, to brush his hair away from the blood. His eyes closed again at her touch, and he seemed to sigh.

She looked him over once more.

He had a tattoo, bright white against his darker skin, on his left cheekbone, a pattern of triangles that seemed plain from afar but was actually made up of myriad miniscule shapes and symbols. His appearance, despite the blood and injuries, was striking. His fine hair, though full of dust, was pale against his tan skin, an odd combination. His eyes were the oddest part of him, though. The bloody one, the left eye, was as golden as the sun, and the right was like a leaf in the summer. Several of his wounds were in near-vital spots, and there was evidence that he had done the crude stitches on some of the bigger cuts himself. He should not have been alive. There was no way that anyone could have survived some of the wounds he had even in normal circumstances.

He raised a weak hand, but his energy gave out and he let it flop back to his side

She took off at a run to get Jin, slipping on the stone steps at the center of town. He would know what to do with the strange man.

* * *

There. Thank you for all your support- I received a great response to the first couple chapters, and I love to hear from you- what you didn't like, what needs improving, etc. Today was the day of the mass update, and I'm happy to get the feedback for anything.


	4. Chapter 4

A Stranger Kind of Empathy Chapter 4

Fever Dream

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It was a lucky thing that they had found him when they did- his strength was giving out and he had finished his last can of preserves four days prior. There had been no rain for weeks, and he was too weak to haul himself down to the murky lake and back for more water.

He had long since resigned himself to his fate, his natural life having run out decades before the shower. His thoughts quickly became fuzzy and delusional without food or water, and then totally nonsensical. He saw old friends who had been dead for years waving at him from out of a spinning void, where colour and light exploded and pulsed and multiplied, unrestrained.

Among other old wounds that had never properly healed, there was a constant, stabbing pain coming from his left eye. He could barely see out of it anyway, and it welled up with blood when he left his eyes open too long.

He knew he had overdone it, knew that the villagers had been aware of his inability to save them. They had run to him desperately, as if seeking the counsel of an archaic and forgotten god in their time of greatest need, and in the end, he had been punished for his efforts to help them.

He wondered what had happened to all the friends he used to know. When had he become a recluse? When had the young lady who would always go stargazing with him left? He could not remember- could hardly recall the face of his old colleagues as they faded unbidden in and out of his mind's eye.

And in the midst of these swimming hallucinations came Hikari, stumbling awkwardly around the ruins of the fortress he had built to take him away. He did not know, for the first time in a very, very long while, what was going to happen. The sensation of ignorance was foreign and uncomfortable- he felt as though he was blindfolded and bound, left helpless in a room full of tigers.

When the man briefly surfaced from his deep haze for the first time, a dusty gent in white with long dark hair and spectacles was writing leisurely on what looked like a cheap child's notebook with a plastic pen, hunched over his work. The pen ran out of ink, and the man in the chair swore, pressing the point into the paper ever harder and tracing squiggles to get the ink to flow again.

The man noticed him, and, dropping the pencil onto the canvas floor unceremoniously, rushed to his side to ask the patient his name. He felt as though he had been sleeping in some ancient tomb, his lungs dry and withered high in his chest.

"…Wizard" He managed to wheeze out his old pseudonym, but it was no more than a dusty, soundless whisper.

There was a clear bottle of murky water swimming with particulate sitting next to the folding cot he lay on. His eye throbbed, and his skin felt too tight, like it had been baked. He could feel the dust in his lungs and the sweat on his brow, matting his bangs despite the cool air. He could not summon enough strength to even raise his hand to grasp the bottle, and so gave up, drifting back off into his strange and malformed dreams. The attendant returned to his seat and fumbled on the floor for his abandoned pen, then, having retrieved it, returned to the notes that he knew in his heart were chock-full of a false, pale and modified hope.

Wizard's new dream was of a world as gray as the one he would wake to. He stood on what he took to be a reed boat, but there was no clear differentiation between sky and land. The tightly-woven bottom was filled with dark, smooth rocks. On the horizon, a huge shape rose from the gray and stood, dripping. It turned, and had no features save for a single giant eye from which flowed tears of every colour. An endlessly mourning giant seeking retribution for his lost land, the governor of the illogical dreamworld he had entered. What was it trying to tell him? He had once been a dream interpreter, in what seemed like another life.

This guardian had allowed him access to its world and he could do nothing but stare and wonder. He could reach none of his former power, and where he would have felt great relief as a younger, more troubled man, he only felt panic. Wizard could do nothing to predict or alter his path through these worlds, and could only hurtle along, prone to the whims of whatever malevolent spirit invited him in.

The giant's eye had closed, great technicolour tears still rolling down its front. Its indefinite edges began to shimmer like summer heat and it turned and slogged soundlessly away, waving to and fro laboriously.

The previous picture ceased and began to twist into another- a too-bright world of fiery red and green and blue, with flowers of every colour that blocked out the sky and a thousand crystal clear streams running from a white stone palace. A very tall woman stood there on a dais, and it gave him an awed, unsure sensation to be near her, though he had not manifested physically in this dream. An ashen girl with short hair of some indiscernible dark colour sat at her feet, facing away from him and making jerky, sporadic movements as though controlled remotely by some unskilled puppeteer. A cloud of spores from some flower in the tangled fantasy jungle had mired his vision for a moment, and he watched, distracted, as they wheeled, furry and out-of-focus in the dim light. When they passed the girl had turned around, and was working her gray hands in her robe- she was entirely faceless. Where her bangs ended there were no brows, no eyes or mouth or nose to be seen- like an uncarved sculpture. All the while, the tall woman watched at him with a righteous rage in her eyes, which were a painful shade of green. Having passed through both dreams, he fell into a deeper state in which there was only blackness.

Hikari had gone outside to paw through the piles of refuse around the little town and catalogue it in her notebook- she felt like a young child, constantly underfoot and trying not to get stepped on. They had cleared a site to set up their camp, but piles of metal scrap, twisted and blackened like enormous dead brambles, surrounded them on almost all sides.

Most of the material there was unusable, parts warped and fused to other parts, but it was still in admirable shape compared to the outer limits of the town, where nothing was even identifiable, let alone valuable. She sifted through the endless ash, sorting through good metal, lumps of old charcoal, scraps of things, shiny bits which she would identify later.

The decorative arabesque off of an old streetlamp, one that had probably come straight off Main Street.

A bit of lovely, though dusty blue glass.

A perfectly intact beer bottle, which she archived and stashed- a valuable find.

An old, blackened bit of leathery, musty stuff- suspicious and creepy. Perhaps a fruit rind of some sort? She discarded that idea- the next few items were splinters of pale bone with the same murky leather-skin still dried on.

A handful of flattened and distorted coins.

Half of a well-preserved sign advertising a general store in swirling old-fashioned red letters.

A gold engagement ring with an illegible inscription.

It was eerie to go through the refuse- she thought of trips to museums in other cities with her parents, how the old civilisations seemed to be straight out of someone else's imagination, someone's movie production. It was all very neatly lined up with captions and explanations behind glass, clean and harmless as though they had always been on display.

Hikari thought of how bitterly funny that was, how she had felt almost untouchable as a teen. The rules hadn't applied to her until the shower, and then when she had woken up out of her drugged sleep, it was as if she had switched bodies with a science-fiction star. The same surreal taste returned to her mouth as she held the objects and sketched them into her book, labelled all the jutting corners and tried to identify them, then tried to remember how they had been used in her old life.

Inside the tent, which seemed to her a forbidding place for the useful elite, Jin wrote on and on about how he was planning to diagnose his patient, and Wizard, the hapless patient, slept a not particularly healing sleep, plagued with odd and indecipherable dreams, unaided by the power which he so often sought to rid himself of.

* * *

Sorry for the wait, again. I got a hardcore set of courses this time around, and they've been taking turns kicking me while I've been down these past few weeks. I'm supposed to be writing a biology report. Well, this chapter is pretty much the beginning of the end- stuff goes down starting now. I'll try to write some more over spring break and finish this up so I can maybe write about some more current games… Still a little torn about that.


	5. Chapter 5

A Stranger Kind of Empathy Chapter 5

Plain Light

I don't own Harvest Moon. Thanks for your support, readers!

* * *

In the end, she had pocketed the ring, though it held no particular significance and served no purpose other than taking up more space in the pocket of her wrinkled and darkly stained uniform. The inscription on the inside was smirched with black, dirt crammed into the delicate engraving. She could not make out the message.

Hikari was uncertain as to how long she had been out, sifting through the dust and hauling away the old refuse. The colourless sky darkened and the wind picked up, bringing with it a great storm of soft motes which lodged in her throat and nose and made her cough. It was eerie at night- the only sounds were her breathing and the sweep of the wind stirring up the endless ash. In the distance the breeze uncovered a strip of old asphalt and buried it again, rhythmic as the tides. To the west, the remains of some tower, a lighthouse perhaps, and a ruined wall were black outlines against a wall of billowing cloud. Though Hikari had found nearly all those childish rumors about the town to be untrue, there was something distinctly unsettling and uncomfortable about being alone in a burnt wasteland, unarmed.

Inside the tent, Jin switched on the battery-powered lantern. It glowed like a yellowish beacon in the growing night, and Hikari shivered, looking to the pile of firewood she had made. She picked up a heavy log, charred and crumbling on one end, and tossed it into the cleared-out fire-pit they had made the night before. The matches were in the tent, and suddenly she was reluctant to go, nervous as a kicked dog. She slipped her hand in her pocket and touched the smooth warm metal of the ring, traced the little ridges of the inscription. The tent smelled of sickness mixed with the sweetish reek of rot. It was sheltered from the wind and warm- she hadn't realized that it was so cold. She took the ring from her pocket and kept it wrapped in her sweating fist, avoiding Jin, who watched her as though she had interrupted something tremendously important.

Sheet upon sheet of paper littered the floor, the slanted script hurried and fading at intervals where the ink had quit.

He rose from his place on the folding chair and stretched carefully and stood, gazing out the open doorflap at the dark outside.

She tried not to look at the patient on her cot- the matches were in her crumpled and abandoned pack underneath. Hikari crept towards the bed- she could see nothing of the man except the very top of his head and some of his face, which peeked from the old, dirty blanket like some ragged animal viewing the world from a cave. A long scar, a strange, elaborate tattoo formed of triangles. She wondered if the silvery quality of his hair was natural, or was it just dust, a trick of the light? He was still asleep, and she returned the ring to her pocket and bent to sort her things. Most of her clothes and supplies had been evicted from her pack- it had been in the way during the rush to prepare for their patient the day before and she had kicked aside.

The matches were under a folded blanket, a nondescript metal box crossed with scratches. The patina was worn off and it did not shine under the weak lamplight. She wondered why they had not sent her off with a lighter instead. Jin had gone outside to fix the framework of her campfire, which had collapsed.

The night was cold- she didn't know the month. There was nothing in the landscape that could tell her, but she guessed it was sometime around the middle of autumn.

Jin turned.

"Give me the matches." She handed them over wordlessly. There was no moon, no stars, no haze of electric light like the cities she had grown up in, and it was lonely somehow. Bare.

He started the fire with a little difficulty, bending down and using one page of his plethora of notes as tinder and cursed it as it blazed up and sputtered out. Hikari sat in the ashes wrapped in a blanket. That man in her cot mad her stomach churn – there was something about him that made her nervous, an ephemeral air of mystery that she couldn't put into words. The old town was a garden of demons and slim, creeping shadows in the brief light of the fire. There was rain coming. She could smell it under the old rank scents of dust and rusting metal.

There was no contact. Wizard had reached out with an invisible hand in the new quiet of his mind and found nothing, where so many times before there had been a presence, oozing and moving fluidly. His Master had told him that it was his power, that the flowing thing in his head was both a manifestation of and a gift from the spirits he could contact. They were not there, for the first time since his boyhood as an apprentice. There was only lightness, emptiness in the space they occupied, an awkward and dread-filled sensation of having left something incredibly important somewhere.

He would have to go back to his house, provided it was still intact. He could not remember if his crystal ball was safe- he knew, though, that his research notes and experiments were all totally destroyed. Several lifetimes of work, gone. He didn't feel particularly devastated- magic research was a transient concept, and there were so few of his kind left in the world when he had started the projects that he had originally held no hopes for it other than personal use. The lamp hooked to the ceiling was bright enough that Wizard could see the little veins in his eyelids, dark scrawls amongst an embryonic background of illuminated blood-red. He did not know what would happen. Everything that happened to him would be a surprise, and he had not known a shock in a very long time.

Wizard reached out with his mind like he had so many times before and targeted the camp lantern. He could feel the switch, but it seemed heavy and immoveable. New sweat welled up on his brow and he began to feel fatigued, but persisted, and felt the little plastic switch give. The sallow light flickered. There was a stab of pain in his left eye, then another and another, and he felt new blood begin to course down his cheek like a fresh tear.

He hadn't been able to predict the shower. He hadn't had even an inkling of its arrival. Wizard could not even predict the weather without his power or his materials, and for one of the very first times in a very long and lonely life he felt cold and defeated and small, the true weight of his solitude.

* * *

Yes, hello! Thank you so much for your support thus far! I made a really embarrassing mistake last time and posted the previous chapter to the wrong story…

It's starting to warm up a bit, even though it's mostly angst right now, I guarantee that it will be heating up plotwise very soon. The stage is set and all that.

Thinking of writing something new where I can describe the crap out of everything, but I don't know what to write for.

Well, thank you as always for putting up with my flakiness.


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